Pleasure has been the subject of intense debate across history and became a particularly important part of discourse in the eighteenth century. This blog accompanies my recent article in Social History 49/3 ‘Emotional economies of pleasure among the gentry of eighteenth-century England.’ In that article I argue that amidst the many and varied pleasures of the public sphere, elite men and women laid claim to the family and family relations as the most enduring and pleasurable of pleasures. Continue reading →